Vehicle repair shops and insurance companies can gain efficiencies and improve quality of service by interoperating electronically to exchange data and documents such as repair requests, estimates, photos, authorizations, invoices, and payments. Some claim-handling systems used by insurance companies can support such interoperability with repair shop systems, known as estimating systems.
An insurer claim-handling system is typically designed to work with a specific brand of estimating system, thus requiring vehicle repair shops to use that brand to interoperate with the insurance company. Different insurance companies may specify or require the use of different estimating systems, which means that vehicle repair shops wanting to interoperate with or perform repairs for two or more insurance companies may have to purchase and maintain two or more estimating systems. The costs of purchasing, using, training, maintaining, and supporting multiple systems are inefficient for any vehicle repair shop and can be prohibitive to smaller vehicle repair shops that would otherwise want to work with multiple insurance companies.